16 Quotes by Kei Miller

To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt – the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.

Look, this isn’t magic realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don’t get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You might as well consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.

She knew that for people to be people, they had to believe in something. They had to believe that something was worth believing in. And they had to carry that thing in their hearts and guard it, for once you believed in something, in anything at all, Babylon would try its damnedest to find out what that thing was, and they would try to take it from you.

For here is the truth; each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that every day contains all of history.

It don’t take no great skill to write down a story. All you have to do is put one word after the next and you continue like that until it done. But it take a special skill to hear a story-to incline your ears toward what may seem like silence. For nothing in this world is silent, you just have to learn how to hear.

Whenever he cried, his grandmother would always tell him, You need a backbone, boy. She thought this was the way to raise a man-child without quite understanding that sometimes it takes backbone to cry the long length of tears required.

Agatha Lazarus found out then that there is a moment when a dream is so utterly crushed, that instead of withering the dreamer will explode. Such is the ache and violence of disappointment.